“Nail-scissors, curved; in the shape of a stork.”
“Don’t be an idiot, Deb—your glorious mane....”
“Oh, Deb——”
But in spite of the protests of Antonia, Nell and Zoe—Gillian sat silent, probably thinking any distraction good for Deb’s soul at the moment—she unpinned her hair and let it fall in a dense blue-black web over her face; her voice came in muffled jerks from the improvised tent:
“It’s that once started ... it seems so silly to stop. So silly and affected. Anyway, they won’t believe you—once you’ve let them start. And I want to be appreciated just a little ... I’m twenty-five; and—and—how—how are you to know it’s going to be the real thing at last, unless you let them begin?... Or even a bit of the real thing? Or even one single thrill.... I don’t know what’s the matter with me that I never thrill. I—I’d go back to be chaste and white if I could. But I’ve had too much tolerance, and my moral sense has got slack and messy. And men know—the sort of thing you allow. It gets about: Blair knew.... One might as well live up to it.” All this confession, while the scissors had been snip-snipping; an occasional soft swish of hair falling to the carpet—disconcerting sound, that made young Nell suddenly wince and cover her ears.
“But you can go on—if you can’t go back.”
“This from you, O vestal!” Deb shook back her ragged curtain, and scissors suspended, gazed in sheer surprise at Antonia. “Or was it Jill speaking in Antonia’s voice?”
“The whole way—or no way. The last, for me. But you’ve proved that it’s impossible for you, now. So the whole way. I despise—debatable ground.”
“It’s too late for the whole way, too. Yes, I’m quite logical. You either rush headlong from chastity into wantonness—forgive me, Jill, it’s the wrong word, but I can’t think of another—or else into matrimony. Debatable ground is for those who hesitate. And hesitation makes the demi-maid!” She gripped a long strand of hair, held it out and slashed at it savagely.
“And it’s queer,” she went on, “but I’ve still got the inborn conviction that wantonness gets the worst of it. I seem to see a little woodcut, like the illustration of a very familiar old book, of a man forsaking the girl he has betrayed, to die or drag on in squalor and shame and bitterness, while he returns to his wife, the sheltered woman, the law-sanctified mother of his children. I may be all wrong—but that’s how it comes to me.”